· Public charity
Wake County Smart Start Inc
Wake county smart start invests in young children, their families, and a connected early childhood system that supports and prepares them for school and life ahead.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2021–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- Under $10k2 grants · $14k
- $50k–250k14 grants · $2.3M
- $250k+23 grants · $19M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| CHILDCARE NETWORK INC | $3,082,694 |
| WAKE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS | $2,684,556 |
| CREATIVE SCHOOLS INC | $1,303,892 |
| BRIGHT BEGINNINGS OF CARY INC | $1,222,922 |
| PRIMARY BEGINNINGS CHILD DEVELOPMENT | $1,066,440 |
| THE HAPPY FACE PRESCHOOL | $880,446 |
| ACADEMICALLY BASED CHILD | $797,586 |
| KIDS FIRST ACADEMY INC | $759,528 |
| ABC LAND INC II | $728,374 |
| TELAMON CORPORATION | $680,820 |
| WAKE COUNTY HUMAN SERVICES | $665,510 |
| WANDA'S LITTLE HANDS EDUCATIONAL CENTER | $661,730 |
| LUCY DANIELS CENTER FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD | $630,699 |
| A SAFE PLACE CHILD ENRICHMENT CENTER INC | $588,438 |
| EARLY PRESCHOOL & LEARNING CENTER LLC | $559,640 |
Do your dollars go where the need is?
Each grant placed by the hardship in its grantee’s ZIP, then read against the area’s typical level.
Your human-services grants (FY21–25, $6.9M) land where the poverty rate runs at 8%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 0% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-need ZIPs.
Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty linein the grantee’s ZIP, averaged from the tracts in that ZIP; grantee ZIP can differ from where services are delivered.
US grants placed by each grantee’s ZIP, which can differ from where services are actually delivered. Need from public data — U.S. Census/ACS, CDC PLACES, Eviction Lab, USDA — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving.
Who you back again
Which organizations you funded more than once, and which you funded a single time. Each grantee is matched to its own filings.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +20% since the first grant, against +18% for the ones you funded once.
42 repeat relationships — 35 still active in FY2025, 7 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (too recent to call).
How the two cohorts compare
Organizations
Total granted
Median revenue growth · since first grant
Still filing today
New vs renewed · share of each year
In FY2025, 96% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $923k went to new ones.
Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant
First-time = a grantee’s first year in your filing window; renewed = funded in an earlier year too. As a portfolio matures the renewed share naturally climbs — once funded, an org stays “renewable” — so the signal is the years that buck it (a new-grantee intake wave). The earliest year is left-censored: relationships that predate the data read as “new.” Theme is the grantee’s IRS cause.
Backed again, and grew
LUCY DANIELS CENTER FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD5× · 2021–2025 · $2.7M · revenue +26%- MCMETHOD CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER IN5× · 2021–2025 · $1.3M · revenue +61% · 32% of their budget
- FLFRANKIE LEMMON SCHOOL AND DEVELOPMENTAL CENTER5× · 2021–2025 · $975k · revenue +68%
Funded once
- URUPPER ROOM CHRISTIAN ACADEMY & PRESCHOOLone grant, 2021 · $407k
- KAKELLEY AUSTIN KINDERCAREone grant, 2021 · $204k
LEARNING TOGETHER INCgraduatedone grant, 2021 · $105k · revenue +28%
Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.
The map has a center of gravity: the average direction from the rest of the sector toward the organizations the foundation funds — the shape of its giving. Scoring every nonprofit along that direction surfaces the ones that look most like the portfolio. These are the closest matchesthat aren’t grantees — a resemblance in what they say they do, not a recommendation.
The north carolina partnership for children (ncpc) is the lead organization and backbone of the smart start network, setting statewide vision, policy, and funding priorities. while local partnerships translate the statewide vision into…
Act as an organization to provide education, information distribution, training, newsletters, fact sheets, and other materials to educate communities about the importance of high quality childhood education, especially for infants and…
To ensure every child in durham enters school ready to succeed, we lead community strategies for children birth to 5, and their families that promote healthy development and learning and echance access to high quality care.
The partnership's mission is to be the driving force to engage partners to achieve lasting positive outcomes for all children, beginning at birth.
The Guilford County Partnership for Children is a local non-profit strategically directing Smart Start and NC Pre-K funding to ensure equitable access to high quality childcare, professional development for early childhood educators and…
When they have challenges, we connect all children and their families to programs and resources that provide opportunities and hope.
To ensure that every child in orange county arrives at school healthy and ready to succeed. we focus on the early years of a child's life, from birth to five, which is the most critical time in a child's development.
Wake county smart start invests in young children, their families, and a connected early childhood system that supports and prepares them for school and life ahead.
To provide services to children and their parents to support their readiness for school.
The partnership shares information and mobilizes resources to support alamance county families in creating and sustaining nurturing environments for their children. our vision is that all children arrive at school happy, healthy and…
Per south carolina code section 59-152-30: "the goals for south carolina first steps to school readiness are to: (1) provide parents with access to the support they might seek and want to strengthen their families and to promote the…
Launch every child as a healthy, lifelong learner by the end of the third grade. This is accomplished through working across the four building blocks of early education. 1) Health and development are on track beginning before birth 2)…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Method Child Development Center in and the most unlike its peers is Rex Hospital Inc. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 34 years old; the field is 11. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 29% startups (under 5 years old) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 15% of the field you don’t fund.
Age = years since IRS exemption (a founding proxy). “Closed” = auto-revocation for 3 years of non-filing — a floor on closure, not proof, and bigger established orgs lapse least. Association, not causation.
24 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2025.
Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue from every source. Association, dated; never a causal claim.
Counted here: distinct organizations you funded across 2017–2025, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 24 of the 61 grantees resolved in that span have returns of their own we could reconcile; the rest are funded organizations whose filings we could not track year by year.
Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee
Each org by its size and your share of it — top-left is where you’re load-bearing
Go grantee by grantee — a decade per org, and how each moved after you funded them
A decade per grantee — revenue shaded, your grants as bars, all rows on one timeline.
- Who funds TELAMON CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds LUCY DANIELS CENTER FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD ↗
- Who funds FAMILY RESOURCE CENTER SOUTH ATLANTIC ↗
- Who funds METHOD CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER IN ↗
- Who funds THE SHAW UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds FRANKIE LEMMON SCHOOL AND DEVELOPMENTAL CENTER ↗
- Who funds EARLY YEARS INC ↗
- Who funds TLC OPERATIONS INC ↗
- Who funds SAFECHILD ↗
- Who funds TRIANGLE AREA PARENTING SUPPORT ↗
- Who funds The Methodist Home for Children Inc ↗
- Who funds PASSAGE HOME INC ↗
- Who funds BOOK HARVEST ↗
The grantmakers whose grantees overlap with yours far more than size alone predicts. Each orbits closer the stronger the alignment; the arcs between them show where they also fund each other. Here it reads as a tightly interlocked camp — most of these funders back each other's grantees too.
Open a dossier: Early Years Inc · Triangle Community Foundation Inc · United Way of the Greater Triangle Inc · Childtrust Foundation · John Rex Endowment · Carolina Hurricanes Foundation · North Carolina Community Foundation · Chatham County Partnership for Children · Aj Fletcher Foundation · Duke University Health System Inc · John William Pope Foundation · The Leon Levine Foundation
Affinity is a Gamma-Poisson posterior co-funding rate, re-centered on the typical rate, so thin evidence shrinks toward no signal. A research starting point: overlap is association, not proof of shared intent.
Government reliance of your grantees
Every dot is one organization Wake County Smart Start Inc funds. Left–right is the share of its income from government; up–down is the share from you. Bigger dots raise more. Filter to federal or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
Government income is each org’s traced federal awards (USASpending — grants and contracts) plus state payments (open checkbooks) as a share of its total revenue (IRS Form 990); the self-reported government-grant line (990 line 1e) is carried for cross-check: a grantee that reports government grants we could not trace to a source is left off the chart rather than shown as receiving none. An association, not a claim that your grant caused the public funding. Coverage is precision-first — a floor, not a census; state records exist for 9 states, so a grantee outside them shows no state figure (dimmed) rather than a false zero. Federal award amounts are obligations, which can span years, so a single-year share is indicative. 990 filings lag 12–24 months.